As I have been documenting Umbraco development I realized that people need a starting point. This post will cover how to start an Umbraco project using an approach suitable for ALM development processes.

The criteria I feel a maintainable solution include are a customizable development project which can be easily in source control with a robust and replicatable database. Of course this has to fall within the options available with Umbraco. For mean this means an ASP.NET web application and a SQL Server database. Let’s take a look at the steps required to get started with this architecture.

Create The Database

I prefer a standard SQL Server database instance over SQL Server Express due to its manageability. For each Umbraco instance we need to create an empty database and then a SQL Server login and a user with permissions to alter the database structure. You will need the login credentials when your first start your site.

Create The Solution

This is the easiest part of the an Umbraco project. The base of each Umbraco solution I create starts with an empty ASP.NET Web Application. Once that is created open the NuGet package manager and install the UmbracoCms package. After that it is simply a matter of building and executing the application.

Finish Installation

As the ASP.NET application starts it will present the installation settings. The first prompt you will get is to create your admin credentials as shown below. Fill these fields in but don’t press any buttons.

The key is the be sure to click the Customize button before the install button as it doesn’t verify whether you want to use an existing database before running the install. It will simply create a SQL Server Express instance on its own. Pressing the Customize button will show the configuration screen shown below. Fill in your SQL Server connection information and click Continue.

Conclusion

Once you start the install sit back and relax. In a few minutes you will have an environment that is ready for your Umbraco development. This will be the starting point for other future posts. Stay tuned.

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Tim is a Solutions Architect for PSC Group, LLC. He has been an IT consultant since 1999 specializing in Microsoft technologies. Along with running the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group and speaking on Microsoft and architecture topics he was also contributing author on "The Definitive Guide to the Microsoft Enterprise Library".